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After two years as chairman of the Los Angeles County Republican Committee—a big post for a man in his early 30s—he was invited to Washington by Nixon in 1958 to handle the then Vice President's bid for the 1960 presidential nomination. That year he became Nixon's campaign director. Many observers of that contest maintain that if Nixon had not persisted in meddling with every detail of the campaign—an unfortunate tendency he learned to master in 1968—he would have become President eight years sooner.
In 1964, Finch shepherded George Murphy through his victorious senatorial campaign. Two years later, in 1966, he won his own election as Lieutenant Governor of California, after what then-Aide William Callender calls a "slide-rule precision campaign that for timing, vigor, and calculation was classic." Finch polled the biggest majority any California Republican had ever achieved in a statewide race, and 92,000 more votes than Ronald Reagan received for Governor. As the returns piled up for his first political victory since college, Finch cried: "How sweet it is! How sweet it is!"
The Political Poet
The Lieutenant Governor was almost immediately at odds with Reagan and his retinue, who resented Finch's independence and his closeness to Nixon. "I'm sure," Finch once remarked, "that some of them think I go home and get on the phone with Dick every night." Finch bitterly opposed cuts in aid to mental hospitals, and initiated legislation to set up a state Department of Human Resources Development, pulling together such social-service functions as job training and the poverty program. As an ex officio member of the University of California's board of regents, he frequently angered the Governor by moderating Reagan's often simplistic, sometimes vindictive attitude toward the strife-ridden university.
Reagan should not have expected a rubber stamp. Even during the campaign, Finch had demonstrated his independence. He opposed, for example, the vote-catching anti-pornography legislation that Reagan vigorously supported. "Finch has adroitly managed to establish an aura of independence without really differing consequentially," said Assembly Democratic Leader Jesse Unruh, with a trace of admiration. "And that takes some doing."
During last year's campaign, Finch was almost constantly at Nixon's side, providing counsel on every key decision. The President's admiration for Finch's political acumen is almost unbounded, and he sometimes refers to him as a "political poet."